Danone - Improving employee experience and operational efficiency in an international context

Customer experience & Service Design

Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) encompasses the governance, oversight, and coordination of projects, products, programs, and portfolios within a company. It ensures strategic alignment, monitors progress, and manages interactions among various stakeholders.

As part of the merger of two entities, Danone aimed to adopt an experience-driven approach to redesign its international teams’ portfolio management processes. The project had a dual objective:

1. Short-term: Design and implement new PPM processes following the merger of two Danone entities.
2. Medium-term: Improve employee experience and operational efficiency by structuring a roadmap for teams managing shared projects.

• 3 — months to align the Danone teams around a short-term target vision of the processes and to build the project teams’ 3-year roadmap.
• 21 — stakeholder interviews across 6 countries.
• 7 — user families: Sponsors, Business owners, Portfolio Managers, Project leaders, Team leaders, Team members, Financial controllers.
• 8 — new project management and portfolio steering processes created to meet strategic and operational needs.

Understanding user needs, pain points, and workflows across diverse teams in France, the Netherlands, China, Singapore, and Poland was the first challenge. This required tailored interview methodologies, remote collaboration tools, and workshop facilitation techniques adapted to cultural and geographical differences.

The second challenge was balancing strategic and employee experience priorities, ensuring that PPM processes met both business objectives and the expectations of portfolio strategy owners.

Finally, understanding Danone’s technical and technological landscape was crucial to designing a feasible solution that aligned with existing IT constraints and partner capabilities.

A research phase during which we conducted interviews with executive sponsors to define business and strategic priorities. Additionally, we engaged 7 user personas across managerial, financial, HR, and operational functions to analyze real-world usage and needs. This phase enabled us to map the international and multidisciplinary context in which we worked throughout the project.

The second phase focused on sharing study insights with stakeholders to establish consensus on the target vision. This vision was co-created with technical teams to define a foundation that aligned with Danone’s technological infrastructure and project timelines.

The final phase involved designing PPM workflows with end-users and specifying technical requirements before production. By the end of this phase, the workflows designed met both user expectations and operational feasibility constraints.

Based on insights from all three phases, we delivered a comprehensive audit of the existing tool and a roadmap integrating medium-term experience and business objectives.

The alignment of stakeholders around user needs and their engagement in the new workflow development was a key achievement, without which implementation would not have been possible. To facilitate this, we emphasized simplified workflow mapping, which served as a communication tool to ensure teams understood the processes before implementation.

The continuous involvement of technical teams enabled us to co-develop the most suitable solution for their operational context.

As a result, Danone successfully optimized its PPM framework by rationalizing existing processes, simplifying governance workflows, and ensuring both feasibility and stakeholder buy-in to support long-term improvements